


it was never meant to be

by Forestgreengirl



Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Assisted Suicide, Canonical Character Death, Descent into Madness, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Morality Crisis’s, Phil’s Clear Favouritism For Techno, Unreliable Narrator, Wilbur Soot Angst, Wilbur Soot and Technoblade and TommyInnit are Siblings, Wilbur Soot is Not Okay, its Wilbur, lets get that out the way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:42:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28768011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Forestgreengirl/pseuds/Forestgreengirl
Summary: wilbur stares at a grey button, there’s a ringing in his ears. he always ends up back in this room.in hindsight, Phil should have known that he didn’t plan to make it out here alive this time.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & Wilbur Soot, Jschlatt & Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot & Phil Watson, Wilbur Soot & Technoblade, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Kudos: 68





	it was never meant to be

**Author's Note:**

> This has been re-uploaded from another account!!

Wilbur feels like he’s splitting apart. Like he’s tearing at the seams. He’s no stranger to the feelings of inadequacy, he’s been feeling it his  _ entire  _ life. 

This is different.    
  
He feels like he’s  _ too much,  _ like an overflowing cup of potential. 

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Wilbur feels like he’s been going down this road since he watched his former-best friend exile him from the nation that  _ he built.  _

He feels like one of the heroes, or a not-quite-heroes from the tales Techno always liked to quietly tell everyone, eyes far-away and much older than they usually were.

Wilbur still wonders what exactly Techno was seeing back then. 

Wilbur eyes the rocky mountain behind him with a tired gaze, eyes the place where he knows that goddamn button sits behind stone, connected to enough TNT to blow up the entire city; if said TNT hasn’t been removed already. 

The button that could fix  _ everything.  _ He feels Techno follow his gaze, before drifting back to meet Wilbur’s wide-eyes. 

They share more than words could ever say in a single look. 

Wilbur knows that Techno knows about the TNT, he’d have to be stupid not to, he may know more than Tubbo does, but WIlbur knew that no matter how much Techno  _ hated  _ everything a government stood for, he was an anarchist and everybody knew it, and Wilbur knew that Techno had his own plans but he would never let Wilbur go through with this if he knew. 

Wilbur glances at Dream, stone-faced and tense behind his mask, standing behind the people  _ celebrating  _ with how they won, and Wilbur takes a slow, shaky breath.    
  
He can feel Dream’s smirk beneath that mask, knows that this is playing out exactly as Dream wanted it to.    
  
He knows what he needs to do. 

_ (-He hates that he can’t feel guilty, hates that he can’t remember what that even feels like anymore. He wonders if this is now Schlatt felt towards the end, when the ending approached, when he knew what the endgame was. Him and Schlatt used to joke when they were kids, about how similar they were.  _

_ Wilbur wants to cry at how true that ended up being. He hates Schlatt, hate’s him as much as he used to love him; and it is painfully ironic that this is how they ended up.)  _

He slips away after a moment of celebration, with quiet words of “ _ I’ll be right back.”  _ spoken to Tommy, who only grins back at him, eyes shining and for  _ once  _ he looks like the kid he was supposed to be. 

Wilbur thinks that this may be what guilt used to feel like. He’s never wanted to hurt Tommy, he’s never wanted to hurt anyone, except for maybe Schlatt, and Eret; but sometimes it's unavoidable. 

He walks to the mountain with an odd feeling in his chest, and maybe this is what apprehension used to feel like? He’s not sure what anything feels like anymore, his emotions feel muddled, like he’s feeling things through somebody else. 

His head is a jumbled mess of what-ifs and almosts, he feels like it’s consuming him from the inside.

And all he can think of is that he can’t think of a world where he doesn’t end up here, doesn’t end up with him feeling the dirt squelch under his foot, and the grey button in front of him, surrounded by the manic scribbles of songs along the walls. 

Wilbur wonders if his brothers, if his family, if his  _ friends  _ knew what he was going to become, whether they knew what he was going to do, because sometimes Phil stared at Wilbur with something unreadable in his eyes, and maybe his dad knew  _ all along.  _

He’s been here seven or eight times before. He feels like he never really leaves this place. 

  
  
  


______

  
  
  
  


Wilbur turns around, and meets Phil’s concerned gaze as the older man appears in the doorway, looking the exact same as he did the last time Wilbur saw him. 

It’s a little unfair, he thinks to himself, that Phil is so unchanged even after Wilbur has gained, and lost, and gained everything again, and bent something inside of him into something ugly.

He opens his mouth, a bitter lie already on the tip of his tongue; he doesn’t know why he’s even attempting it, Phil has always been able to see through his lies. 

Brown meets blue, and Wilbur resists the urge to shuffle his feet like he's a child. 

“Phil?” Wilbur breathes out, the same breathless energy as a few moments before. 

“Yeah. In L’Manberg you said?” Phil responds, something disappointed in his voice, and it makes Wilbur’s stomach churn. 

“This- this is L’Man-,” He starts, trying to decide how he’s going to play this out. There’s not really any way he can convince Phil he  _ wasn’t  _ about to blow it all to high-hell, considering Phil caught him  _ by  _ the button, “okay, I will admit-...Do you know what this button is?”    
  
“Uh huh, I do.”    
  
“Have you heard the song, on the walls before? Have you heard the song?” Wilbur breathes out, and he can feel Phil’s confusion behind him. Wilbur doesn’t know how to explain it, doesn’t know how to explain that the longer he stands here, the more he feels like he’s fracturing. He needs to do it, he needs to do it  _ now,  _ before he can lose his nerve again. 

  
“I was just saying, I made a point, it was poignant. And it was that there was a special place where men could go. But it’s not there anymore.” It’s gone, the L’Manberg he saved, the L’Manberg he promised everyone is gone, and Tubbo will be a  _ good  _ president, a much better one than Schlatt or Wilbur himself could have been, but he’s still just a  _ kid;  _ him and Tommy are both still kids, and Wilbur isn’t sure that version of L’Manberg exists anymore.    
  
“But it _ is. _ It is there. You’ve just won it  _ back  _ Will.”

_“Phil I am always so close to pressing this button! I have been here like 7 or 8 times.”_ Wilbur yells, a sudden rush of desperate anger spreading like wildfire through his bones. He’s been dreaming of this place for _months,_ he’s been tasting ash in the back of his mouth every time he wakes up, he’s been dreaming of the echoing explosions for months. 

He’s already come this far. 

“Oh they’re...oh they’re going to come, I need to block this off, I don’t want them in here.” Wilbur mutters, walking over to place down the obsidian blocks at the entrance. He doesn’t want the others coming in here, he’s not sure he could do it if he had to stare somebody else in the eyes;  _ especially  _ if it was Tommy. 

Faintly, he can hear the sounds of yelling and arrows, and Wilbur feels like he’s underwater. 

“Phil I- They’re fighting, they’re fighting.” They would never stop fighting. L’Manberg is a country built on bloodshed and violence and it is the only language it knows.    
  
“And you want to just blow it all up?” Phil sounds skeptical.    
  
“Dare I do?” 

Wilbur remembers a time when he and Techno were younger, when the two of them sat around a fire, bruises and scratches up and down their arms from when they ran into a patch of mobs. Wilbur sat upright, hissing every time his tongue brushed his split lip, when Techno spoke, voice scratchy and distant.

_ “Will, do you know the tale of Icarus? Of how he made wings out of wax, and despite all the warnings, flew too close to the sun, and the wings melted.”  _

_ “Well I didn’t till now. That’s so depressing.”  _

And that had been the end of the conversation, Wilbur didn’t think too much of it, not of the way Techno watched him carefully those next few days, and not of the odd tone in his voice. But now Wilbur can’t help but wonder if he knew, if he knew what Wilbur was going to do. 

  
“You fought so hard to get this land back,” Phil starts, and Wilbur forces him to make eye-contact with the man that had taken him in and raised him as his son, “ _ So hard _ .” 

“I don’t even know if it works anymore Phil. The button; I don’t know if it works. I could press it and it might not.” That was the truth of it, he never checked whether the TNT was still there.    
  
“Do you really want to take that risk? There’s a lot of TNT connected to that button.” Phil chuckles nervously, and Wilbur takes a step backwards as Phil takes one forward. 

“There was a saying Phil, by a traitor, once part of L’Manberg; I don’t know if you’ve heard of Eret?” Eret’s name still left a bad taste in Wilbur’s mouth, he’s never dealt with the betrayal of friends well, and Eret’s was still one that hurt the _most._   
  
“Yeah...” 

“He had a saying.” Wilbur’s voice sounds choked when he says this, making sure to turn enough that he doesn’t have to look Phil in the eyes. 

There’s a faint ringing sound in his ears.

“I _ t was never meant to be.”  _

He slams his elbow into the button, feeling it press beneath him, listening for the faint hissing sound that soon follows. 

“ _ Oh my god.” _ Phil chokes out, surprise and shock filtering through his voice. And Wilbur feels something vindictive fill himself, something almost  _ pleased;  _ even as the explosions make his ears ache, feeling rock shrapnel hit his back. 

“You  _ Didn’t _ ” 

_ He did.  _ The explosions have ripped through the core of L’Manberg, and if Wilbur focuses enough, he can hear the yelling of everyone below him, he can hear Techno’s manic speech, and can hear the still exploding TNT.    
  
“Will, it’s all  _ gone. _ ” 

“ _ My L’manberg Phil!”  _ Wilbur starts gleefully, “ _ my unfinished symphony, forever unfinished _ ! _ If I can’t have this no one else can Phil.”  _

Wilbur wants to scream. Wants to tear something apart beneath his hands. He hates that  _ this  _ is what gets Phil’s attention, he finally gets Phil to  _ look  _ at him, instead of Techno, and it’s at the end of  _ everything.  _

It’s not as satisfying as he thought it would be. 

  
He physically feels something inside of him unravel, like a house of cards being knocked over. Everything rises to the surface quicker than Wilbur knows how to process. 

Phil should have known that Wilbur never planned to make it out of here alive.    
  
“Phil kill me. Kill me Phil. Stab me with the sword. Kill me.” Wilbur begs desperately, throwing his diamond sword at Phil’s feet. 

“Murder me now, Kilza,  _ Kilza _ , do it, kill me Phil. Murder me Phil, they all want you to.” They both cast a look down below them, at the multiple other people gathered at the crater that used to be L’Manberg. Wilbur meets Tommy’s gaze at the same time as Phil, reads the confusion, and the horror and the  _ shock  _ in his little brother's eyes. 

“Do it Phil, kill me.”   
  
“I  _ can’t _ ,  _ you’re my son _ ! No matter what you do, no matter what you’ve done, I can’t.”    
  
Wilbur wants to punch Phil directly in the face. Wilbur always knew that Phil would damn the world for Techno, and for Tommy; he never knew that Will would be willing to do it for him. But Wilbur knows he’s far past saving, he died with L’Manberg, and he’s not coming back this time.    
  
“Phil, Phil look. _ Look _ how much work went into this and it’s all gone.  _ Do it. _

  
Wilbur watches as Phil turns to gaze at the destruction he’s brought upon the area, and he can see the moment of realisation pass through Phil’s eyes as he realises what he’s going to do. 

Wilbur stares at him, something manic and  _ broken,  _ and so goddamn relieved in his eyes, and he clutches the sword with shaky hands, he watches Phil raise it up, and he smiles a soft, fractured smile. 

_ (Wilbur wonders if Icarus felt relieved towards the end, to be free of everything that had happened, that was to happen. Wilbur wonders if for a moment, Icarus thought that the end justifies the means.)  _

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> bet this isn’t something you expected me to post LMAO; 2021 am I Right. This dragged me in and now I am Suffering- 
> 
> Tumblr: @forestgreengirl


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